Kent, Washington-based Stoke Space has completed the initial closing of a $1 billion Series E funding round, one of the largest private raises ever for a launch startup. The round was co-led by Point72 Ventures and Spark Capital, with participation from General Innovation, Glade Brook Capital, US Innovation Technology, Washington Harbour Partners, Woven Capital, Y Combinator, and others.
The financing takes Stoke's total capital raised to $2.3 billion and sets the company up to attempt one of the hardest engineering feats in the space industry: full reuse of both rocket stages.

Attacking the hardest part of rocket economics

Stoke is developing Nova, a launch vehicle designed from the outset around rapid, full reuse rather than recovery of only the booster. Its first Nova Pathfinder orbital mission is targeted for early 2027, while a larger Nova Block 2 variant is planned to carry about 15 metric tons to low Earth orbit.
Launch has increasingly become critical infrastructure: satellite constellations, national-security missions, communications networks, and sovereign space programs all depend on reliable access to orbit, yet the market remains concentrated around a small number of providers. Stoke's second-stage technology — including active cooling and an architecture engineered for rapid turnaround — targets the portion of launch economics that has proved hardest to reproduce.

The SpaceX benchmark

The competitive bar is obvious. SpaceX dominates reusable launch, while Rocket Lab, Relativity Space, Firefly, and others are pursuing slices of the market. Stoke is not simply being financed to reach orbit; the billion-dollar bet is that it can demonstrate a second company building a repeatable, fully reusable orbital transportation system.
That outcome would be far more valuable than a single successful launch — but also far more difficult to achieve.